"Me, the gunman, and God"

Security guard? That's not quite accurate. Jeanne Assam, the former police officer whose fearless shooting halted the massacre at New Life Church on Sunday, was first of all a church member, a Christ-follower. She was one of those voluntarily standing watch during the late service after having worshiped at an earlier service. She brought her gun to New Life that day in readiness to risk her life for the protection of others' lives, and for the defense of fellow believers' right to practice their faith unmolested. Good thing she did. Matthew Murray, the deranged killer, wanted Christians dead and set his own life at no value toward that end. Jeanne Assam wanted Christians protected and alive and safe -- and set her own life at no value toward that end. She advanced on him like David against Goliath, and with the same result. How instructive it is to read their contrasting accounts in today's Denver Post (see the foregoing links).

And how utterly backward, in light of all this, is Tuesday's letter to the Post by Robert Tiernan of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Though he condemns Mitt Romney for having "pandered to deists" and "ignored the rights of atheists," that's not what the Massachusetts Republican did in last week's speech. Rather, Romney explained precisely why an America where faith flourishes is a far better country -- a place where the self-giving typified by Assam can overcome the self-destructiveness tragically manifested in Murray.

Violence and bloodshed and lives on the line in places of faith, such as our state experienced this weekend in Arvada and Colorado Springs, are not as incongruous as they may seem. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah, concluding today, commemorates a desperate fight for survival 2100 years ago by believers in the biblical God. The Christmas story, retold in churches this month, includes soldiers slaughtering infants as one family flees for its life.

The newborn son of that family, Jesus of Nazareth, would grow up to tell his followers, "A time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God" (John 16:2). His own execution was carried out soon thereafter, with that very motivation.

So the deadly hatred voiced by Matthew Murray is nothing new after all. "You Christians brought this on yourselves," he wrote on a website in the midst of Sunday's killing spree. "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can, especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems of the world."

Peter and his fellow apostles would not be surprised at this syllogism of evil, in the first century or the 21st. Robert Tiernan would no doubt disavow the murderer's conclusion; but would he completely reject the premise? As for Jeanne Assam, Christ-follower and armed churchgoer -- she, thank God, left home on the morning of December 9 fully aware of the risks that faith involves, and fully prepared to face them.

Where are the great?

(Denver Post, Dec. 2) Midgets everywhere. Rappers, starlets, shrinks, scolds, facilitators, litigators, hustlers, hucksters, victims, vegans. Ours is the age of the shallow, the small, the squalid. Where are the great? “There were giants in the earth in those days,” says Genesis. Granted, every era magnifies the memory of bygone times. But what now passes for excellence in manhood and womanhood, thought and expression, moral and civic life, would make our grandparents shake their heads. For a third of a century we’ve lived in a house I call Marcus Bend, after my mother’s father, who helped buy it. I’m here surrounded with books and mementoes as the old year wanes, sobered by Christmas clamor, candidate noise and war news, wondering and worrying: Where are the great?

Stacked on the desk are “From Dawn to Decadence” by Jacques Barzun, “America: The Last Best Hope” by William Bennett, “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis, Winston Churchill’s memoir “My Early Life,” an FDR biography by Conrad Black, books on Chesterton and John Paul II, “The Western Canon” by Harold Bloom, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” and his Harvard address. Collectively they look upon 2007 and frown.

The scholarly Barzun, who turned 100 last week, is a great man of our time and a worthy judge of greatness. His book, a history of civilization from 1500 to the present, warns of today’s “urge to build a wall against the past…a revulsion from things in the present that seem a curse from our forebears.”

He writes of the 20th century as a time when elements that “made the nation-state the carrier of civilization… a common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service… were decaying and could not be restored.” He hopes for a 22nd century when boredom may stir new “radicals” to study afresh the old texts, “the record of a fuller life,” from which the West then rediscovers “what a joy it is to be alive.” Of the present century Jacques Barzun is less hopeful.

By what sickness of the soul could America and other nations blessed with the heritage of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia come to see all of this as “a curse from our forebears?” Solzhenitsyn, another contemporary great, gives the diagnosis:

“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer…. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty.” It is not true, insists the Russian giant, that “man is above everything.” Nor is it right that “man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all.”

Courage, faith, integrity, and honor, ordinary virtues harnessed to extraordinary gifts, constitute human greatness or the potential for it. Guy McBride, retired president of the Colorado School of Mines, and Vernon Grounds, retired president of Denver Seminary, have that heroic stature with me. Some of those books I’ve found so inspiring, by or about the great, reached me through them.

Great souls ennoble our world in big and little ways. Think of the late Bill Hosokawa of the Denver Post, or former Sen. Bill Armstrong. Is there a touch of that in Peter Groff, recently chosen as Colorado Senate President? We’ll see.

Over the centuries, nations flourish and fade in a cycle, the Scots philosopher Alexander Tytler is supposed to have said. Out of bondage come faith and courage, then liberty and abundance. But when these breed complacency and apathy, dependence ensues and bondage returns. If this sounds like an American self-portrait, we need to value greatness more.

Thanksgiving 2007, such as it is

Two turkeys named May and Flower will not be carved up tomorrow after all. They were spared by a mock presidential pardon earlier this week. Do you care? Me neither, but I learned about it on the White House home page, in the course of looking for President Bush's official Thanksgiving Day proclamation. The pardon story is right there up front, whereas you have to drill down a layer or two to find the proclamation. This is what we've come to, 218 years after the First US Congress resolved to ask President George Washington for an official proclamation of national thanksgiving. He obliged with this masterpiece, which along with Lincoln's wartime proclamation of 1863 is probably the best known in the long line of annual documents.

I enjoy reading each year's proclamation, no matter who is in the White House. I grew up hearing them read in church services on the Thursday morning, prior to our family dinner around my mother's or grandmother's table. The menu was always turkey, but back then that wasn't the name of the day. The day was about giving gratitude to God for his favor upon our nation, and honoring Him in hope of its continuation.

In the 1950s in those towns where I lived in Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado, Americans still believed that "it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor," as Washington's 1789 proclamation puts it.

Many agreed with the Father of our Country, even then, that the prayers on Thanksgiving Day should go so far as to "beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions" as well as "to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue" in America.

Lincoln's 1863 proclamation is also worth reading in full and pondering. In the third year of a horrific civil war, the Emancipator was able to enumerate many blessings for which gratitude to God was due, summarizing: "No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy."

Like Washington, he too urged that the day include "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience," and his recommended approach to praying for peace did not omit a submissive note, foreshadowing the Second Inaugural address 16 months later. Citizens, he urged, should "fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union" (italics added).

It's a long way from the sunlit America of 1789 to the agonized land of 1863 to the turkey pardon of 2007. I very seldom agree with Marx about anything, but you wonder if this is one of those cases he noted of history repeating itself -- first as tragedy and then as farce.

While President Bush's proclamation for this year contains little that God-fearing Americans may disagree with, there is almost nothing in it that challenges us to remember a Deity whom the first president called "that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be" and whom the 16th president referred to as "the Source... our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."

Bush mentions God only a single time in his own words about the present day, and only twice more in historical references to what earlier generations believed. This from a president who is undoubtedly a man of deep faith, directed to a country that has been called the world's most devout, "a nation with the soul of a church." It's a matter, I guess, of what any public official is now permitted (by the secularist watchdogs of mass media and cultural elites) to say upon any public occasion, even Thanksgiving Day. One is moved to cry out, not flippantly but in all earnest: God help us!

Campos flunks Federalist 101

Paul Campos, the CU law professor and Rocky Mountain News columnist, needs to acquaint himself with James Madison, the father of our Constitution and fourth president of the United States. In a piece published on election day, Campos enthuses over a book called Our Undemocratic Constitution by fellow law prof Sandy Levinson of Texas. With iconoclastic bravado he entertains such daring questions as "whether [anyone's] lifelong devotion to the [Constitution] makes sense" and "whether some of our most basic political arrangements need to be overthrown." What Campos and Levinson overlook is merely the little problem of how any large and populous republic can avoid self-destructing through a tyranny of the majority. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, co-authors of The Federalist Papers, struggled in print with this age-old difficulty, after they and 50 other gifted statesmen -- next to whom these pompous profs are as pygmies -- had struggled with it in convention for months at Philadelphia. Federalist No. 51, penned by Madison, sums up the challenge this way:

"...what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

Campos suavely labels the checks, balances, and compromises of the Philadelphia Convention's workmanship as "products of political choices made 220 years ago... that are ripe for revisiting, given that the world has changed somewhat since the 18th century." He offers no proof, however -- nor could he -- that human nature with its failings and its power-lust has changed one bit in all these years. Indeed he shows no comprehension at all that abuse of political power is even a problem.

Apparently on Planet Campos the angelic conditions are present which Madison found lacking here on earth. O happy fortune to live in Boulder, where there is no need to "oblige [government] to control itself."

Note: After writing the above for the Gang of Four blog on PoliticsWest.com, I was delighted to receive supporting fire from Joshua Sharf on that same blog, and from Denver attorney Roger Castle as cited below:

Somebody with more voice than me needs to "school" these two law professors about the Constitution, and about logic! These are truly hare-brained ideas.

1. Who said anything should be, or is, best as a pure democracy? He assumes it is, without first establishing that. Shallow!

2. Did he ever read his history books about how the States agreed to come together, only with protection for their States' independence and rights? Moreover, his argument assumes that the "undemocratic" Senate reigns supreme, unchecked by the "democratic" House? Why is that wonderfully "democratic" House letting that nasty undemocratic Senate "steal" all those federal tax dollars? And why does he believe the "democratic" House's majority power should henceforth be allowed to "steal" tax revenues from the smaller (Senate) states against their consent?

3. Because both houses have to agree and the President can veto, he complains that this makes "legislative reform" difficult? Isn't that a choice word! In plain English, he really means that two houses make it more difficult to "pass new laws". Those Constitutional provisions limit the power of government and slow the process of knee-jerk change. It also gives some respect to the status quo and tradition. Those are principles to which the "progressive" law professor is no doubt opposed, but to which the vast majority of the "democratic-voting" Americans would readily agree. How many times have you heard someone complain recently about there not being enough laws being passed?

4. If, under our representative system, "only the rich and powerful can get laws passed", why would we want to give them even more ease in passing those laws....er,sorry..."reforms"? If a purely "democratic" Congress is the answer, why doesn't the current "democratic" House already block all those laws designed by the Senate for the "rich and powerful"? After all, the Senate and the President can do nothing alone!

5. Right now, we sure don't have too much partisan political posturing, campaigning, mudslinging, and carping do we? Our Congressional leaders are all just wholly committed to simply doing the business of the people? Right! *&%#@*^+**. So what do these two professors want to do? Have Congress constantly debating/posturing to have the current "incompetent" President removed early! Because after all, changing Presidents and having Presidential campaigns are just not happening enough to suit our tastes!

6.Query: why didn't Campos/Levinson advocate this Presidential removal provision during the Clinton years? It couldn't possibly be due to their politics, so it must be their newly enlightened view of how wonderful pure democracy is -- but which they don't bother to explain to us.

7. While technology, etc., has changed, human nature and political power have not changed one iota since "220 years ago" or the "18th Century". They still need to be held in check! And these two guys are prime examples.

Spooky signs for US economy

Even though the Federal Reserve will probably treat Americans to an interest rate cut on Halloween, the goblins of massive debt -- consumer, corporate, and government -- still loom large over the US economy. So it's flattering when one of my postings here about that scary situation is echoed by a respected economic commentator. Dr. Marc Faber (author of the Gloom, Boom and Doom report, and who correctly predicted the 1987 stock market crash) used the same alcoholic metaphor as yours truly in saying of the Fed's earlier cut in US interest rates:

“Each time you bail out, the problems become bigger and bigger, and the credit problems become much, much larger. The Fed feeds its customers with booze, and when they get totally drunk and fall off their chairs, the bartender gives them more booze to keep them going. One day, it will lead to the ultimate breakdown.”

What that 'ultimate breakdown' will be, I'm not exactly sure – but it probably won't be pretty. I hope I'm wrong that the US won't have to suffer the mother of all economic hangovers; however, I don't see any way around it. No country can have long-term, sustainable economic growth based solely on borrowing, spending and increasing the money supply – and the US is no exception.

My 2007 year-end gold estimate of $818/ounce also looks good. Gold's trading at $783.50 today (10/26) with solid upward momentum. No market goes straight up or straight down, and commodities tend to have some violent swings in both directions. I realize the Dow has gone back over 14,000 recently, but when you look at inflation-adjusted gains of the Dow versus gold, there's no comparison.

The so-called 'barbarous relic' has tripled from its low of $252/ounce in 2000, while the Dow's performance isn't nearly that impressive, even though it's increased in nominal terms from a low of around 7,500 in 2002 to the mid-13,000s. This increase in the Dow index does not correlate to a healthy American economy – no matter what CNBC talking heads or Washington politicians say. Billionaire investor Jim Rogers (former odd-couple investing partner of George Soros, and co-founder of the Quantum Fund), says the US is “undoubtedly in recession.”

And never mind what Larry Kudlow, Dick Cheney, or Mike Rosen may claim, national deficits and debt still matter – now more than ever.